> KDE was a mess because the Qt3 to Q4 change was a humongous change.
KDE 4 was a mess because in addition to the Qt upgrade they decided to jump on the semantic nonsense fad as well as develop a completely separate set of widgets for the desktop and the shoehorn those things into everything. Oh then there was the overengineered PIM framework that starts a MySQL server on your desktop system even if all you want is to have holidays being highlighted in the clock widget's calendar. Also they released what was still an alpha at best as 4.0 - version numbers for user facing releases do matter.
Solid, Phonon, Plasma, Nepomuk, Akonadi, Sonnet, and many others.
Some of them paid off well (eg Solid and Plasma), some were less successful. That's a very normal thing.
KDE 4 wasn't a mess. Later versions (4.7 afterwards) were very polished and usable.
The problem was that KDE 4.0 was hyped to no end. Distributions jumped on the hype and had a race to ship it first. Although KDE developers all warned that the .0 release is nowhere as stable.
They had to get it out though. It was already in the works for 2-3 years and some projects were losing volunteers because their working was not going to be released and were losing motivation.
KDE 4 was a mess because in addition to the Qt upgrade they decided to jump on the semantic nonsense fad as well as develop a completely separate set of widgets for the desktop and the shoehorn those things into everything. Oh then there was the overengineered PIM framework that starts a MySQL server on your desktop system even if all you want is to have holidays being highlighted in the clock widget's calendar. Also they released what was still an alpha at best as 4.0 - version numbers for user facing releases do matter.